Does anyone know a good software to convert dvds to digital files? I'm trying to find a way to watch more tv shows and movies on my ipad during
my commute to work. No wifi on the train so I"ve been relying on Netflix's watch offline feature but that is far from robust.

It's a straight forward video/audio player, with one major twist that is amazing. If you go the the View tab, you'll be able to toggle
Advanced Controls on. When you do that you'll see a few extra buttons pop up. Above the Play icon you'll see a circle icon for Record.

And you're almost done figuring it out. Play the movie. As soon as you see one second has gone by and it is indeed starting to play, hit the
record button. Now walk away and let it go. Once the video is done, hit stop (don't worry about the times or anything... if you let it go for 10
hrs and it appears to be recording the menus after the movie ends, you're not actually creating a 10 hour file.) It's idiot-proof.

I think it default outputs the video to My Videos folder and will be titled something like vlc-record-2019-07-19-22h56m38s-movie name that you just
recorded.mpeg

Now you have a 1:1 perfect copy of your movie. It will of course be a huge 4-8GB MPEG file, but it's legit. The great thing about this method is
that VLC Player is a wonderful little player that is useful without the recording ability, so you're not just downloading this whole program for
one tool it has.

If you want to shrink it down to something more manageable like a 2-3GB MP4 file, use Handbrake. I can give pointers for that if you need...

One disclaimer about VLC recording a movie, is that this method works for probably 98% of DVDs, but there are some it will fail on, probably due to
anti-piracy software buried in the disc. Basically everything seems totally fine, but about halfway through the watching the movie file, the audio
drops out. I've only seen this happen a couple times. Always possible my PC was just being stupid and that I'm wrong about it being
anti-piracy stuff.